Month: October 2024

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Usage Word origin Writing

Is a scaredy-cat scary?

Q: Halloween being just around the corner, I am curious about the history of the word “scary.” In standard American English, it means inspiring fear, but I often hear African-Americans and white Americans from the South use it to mean easily frightened.

A: Those two senses of the adjective “scary” (fearsome and fearful) have been around for hundreds of years. Both are accepted without reservation in all current standard American dictionaries and at least one standard British dictionary.

Merriam-Webster, an online American dictionary, defines “scary” as (1) “causing fright,” (2) “easily scared,” and (3) “feeling alarm or fright.” It has these two examples: “a scary movie that gave the child nightmares for weeks afterwards,” and “a scary horse who spooked and kicked at its own shadow.”

Collins, an online British dictionary, lists both senses in British English, defining them as (1) “causing fear or alarm; frightening” and (2) “easily roused to fear; timid.” All the other standard British dictionaries we’ve checked list only the first sense.

The Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference, defines “scary” as (1) “terrifying, frightful” and (2) “frightened, timorous.” It describes the second meaning as “originally and chiefly North American.”

The first sense appeared in the 16th century. The earliest OED citation (with the adjective spelled “skearye”) is from an English translation of the Aeneid, a Latin epic by the Roman poet Virgil:

“But toe the, poore Dido, this sight so skearye beholding, What feeling creepeth?” (from Thee First Foure Bookes of Virgil His Æneis, 1582, translated by Richard Stanyhurst, an Anglo-Irish literary scholar, poet, and translator).

The second sense was first recorded in the 18th century. The earliest Oxford example is from correspondence by an American merchant in London to his partners in Maryland:

“If you are scary, we never shall cut any figure in the business” (from a letter dated Nov. 29, 1773, in Joshua Johnson’s Letterbook, published in 1979). Johnson left England during the American Revolutionary War and returned after the war.

The most recent OED citation for the second sense is from a children’s book by an English writer: “He was as scary of being seen as a wild deer” (from Thursday’s Child, 1970, by  Noel Streatfeild).

As for the etymology of “scary,” the dictionary says it was “formed within English, by derivation”—that is, by adding the suffix “y” to the noun “scare.” In Middle English, the noun (spelled “skere”) had the now obsolete sense of fear or dread.

The noun was derived from the use of the verb “scare” (“skerre” in Middle English) to mean frighten or terrify. The OED’s earliest citation for the verb is from the Ormulum (circa 1175), a collection of early Middle English homilies:

“He wile himm færenn ȝiff he maȝȝ & skerrenn mare. & mare” (“He [the devil] will frighten him if he can and scare him more and more”).

Middle English borrowed the verb “scare” from early Scandinavian. In Old Norse, skirra meant to terrify, avoid strife, or shrink from, similar to the adjectival senses of “scary” in Modern English.

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English English language Etymology Language Linguistics Pronunciation Usage Word origin Writing

Why is the ‘w’ silent in ‘write’?

Q: I am wondering why one pronounces “w” at the beginning of some words and not others. Those not pronounced seem to be paired with “r” (“write,” “wrong,” “wrist,” “wry,” etc.). And then there are pronunciation pairs like “wrap”/“rap,” “wrest”/“rest,” “wrote”/“rote,” and “wring”/“ring.” I assume they are unrelated.

A: The short answer is that the spelling and pronunciation of English have evolved a lot since Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—migrants from what is now Germany and Scandinavia—brought the language to England in the fifth century. And the evolution has been quite messy.

In our 2023 post about why a “w” is called a double-u, we discuss the origin and pronunciation of the letter, and we note that in Old English, the “w” sound was pronounced before the letters “l,” “r,” and “n,” a usage that died out in Middle English. The silent “w” in “wr-” spellings is a survivor of that usage.

Why, you ask, do we no longer pronounce “w” in the words “wrong,” “wrist,” “write,” “wry,” and so on? Probably because speakers of Old English and Middle English found the “wr” pronunciation difficult.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “Some 130 words in wr- are recorded from the Old English period, and a number of these survive in the later language, while others have been added from Dutch and Low German.”

In early use, the dictionary says, “wr is a consonantal combination occurring initially in a number of words (frequently implying twisting or distortion).”

However, the “early difficulty in pronouncing the combination may be indicated by the Old Northumbrian spellings with wur-,” the OED notes, and by the spelling of “writ” as “weritt” and “wrongous” (wrongful) as “werangus” by the 14th to 15th century.

In Middle English, Oxford says, the letter “r” is sometimes separated from the “w” by metathesis, the transposition of sounds or letters, as in “wræð” (wroth) becoming “wærð,” “wrech” (wretch) becoming “werch,” and “written” becoming “wirten.” (The letter “ð,” or eth, was pronounced “th.”)

“Signs of the dropping of the w begin to appear about the middle of the 15th cent.,” the dictionary says, citing such spellings as “ringe” for the verb “wring” and “rong” for the adjective “wrong,” and the “w”-dropping “becomes common in the 16th.”

The OED adds that “reduction of the sound is also indicated by the converse practice of writing wr- for r-, which similarly appears in the 15th cent. (in wrath for rathe), and becomes common in the 16th.” (The archaic “rathe” means  prompt and eager.) In standard English, Oxford says, the extra “w” was dropped from these words in the 17th century.

As for those pronunciation pairs, you’re right in assuming that they’re unrelated etymologically. But two of the pairs might be described as acquaintances. Because of the short-lived practice of writing “wr-” for “r-,” the word “rap” was briefly spelled “wrap,” and “ring” was briefly “wring.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Grammar Language Usage Word origin Writing

Is this an odd use of ‘even’?

Q: I’m curious about the use of “even” here: “Bill knows it’s the right thing to do. Even Tom knows it’s the right thing to do.” It seems that “even” suggests our expectations for Tom are lower than for Bill. How does “even” do that?

A: The adverb “even” here indicates a special or exceptional instance of a more typical one. In your examples, “Bill knows it’s the right thing to do” is the typical occurrence, and “Even Tom knows it’s the right thing to do” is the special one.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “even” is used as an adverb “to convey that what is being referred to is an extreme case in comparison with a weaker or more general one which is stated or implied in the adjacent context.”

The earliest OED example of “even” used this way is from The Obedience of a Christen Man (1528), by the Protestant biblical translator and reformer William Tyndale:

 “All secretes knowe they [the Roman Catholic hierarchy], even the very thoughtes of mennes hertes.” Tyndale is apparently referring to secrets heard in the confessional.

(Tyndale’s book is said to have influenced Henry VIII’s decision in 1534 to break with Rome and become the supreme head of the Church of England. Tyndale, arrested in the Netherlands, was executed for heresy in 1536.)

The dictionary’s most recent citation for “even” used in the special sense is from Time Out New York (Jan. 18, 2007): “Even the newest New Yorker knows that the furthest eastern border of Greenwich Village is Fourth Avenue.”

Although English is believed to have inherited “even” from prehistoric Germanic, the OED says, the use of the term for an exceptional occurrence “is not attested in other Germanic languages.”

When “even” was first recorded in Old English it was an adjective, emn, meaning “level, smooth, uniform,” according to the OED. It appears in the dictionary’s first citation as emnum, the dative (or indirect object) form of emn:

“Seo burg wæs getimbred an fildum lande & on swiþe emnum” (“The city was built in a field and on very level ground”). From the Old English Orosius, a late 9th- or early 10th-century translation from the Latin of Paulus Orosius’s Historiarum Adversum Pagano Libri VII (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans).

When the adverb “even” showed up in Old English as efnast, the OED says, it similarly meant “steadily, smoothly; uniformly, regularly.” The first citation is from Psalm 118:77 in the Paris Psalter:

“Me is metegung on modsefan, hu ic æ þine efnast healde” (“For me a modest mind is how I faithfully [i.e., regularly] keep your commandments”).

The adverb still has those senses today, but how did it come to describe something special—in other words, something that’s odd as well as something that’s even?

The OED says the usage is “a natural development” from a now-obsolete Old English use of “even” (spelled efne) to introduce, among other things, “a qualifying circumstance,” with the sense of “namely,” “that is to say,” or “truly.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from Guthlac B, an Old English poem about the death of St. Guthlac of Croyland, a hermit in the Anglian Kingdom of Mercia. The poem is based on Vita Sancti Guthlaci (Life of Guthlac), an 8th-century Latin work by Felix of Crowland, an East Anglian monk:

“He fyrngewyrht fyllan sceolde þurh deaðes cyme, domes hleotan, efne þæs ilcan þe ussa yldran fyrn frecne onfengon” (“He must accept his fate to gain glory through the coming of death, even [that is to say] the same fate our parents of old accepted”).

Although the OED traces the use of “even” to introduce an exceptional occurrence to that Old English usage, the dictionary notes that the exceptional sense of the adverb “seems not to have arisen before the 16th cent., and took time to become fully established.”

If you’d like to read more, we wrote posts in 2017 and 2020 that discuss some of the other senses of the word “even.”

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English English language Etymology Expression Language Phrase origin Slang Usage Word origin Writing

Keep your pecker up

Q: In Confusion (1993), a novel set in the early ’40s and part of her “Cazalet Chronicle,” Elizabeth Jane Howard uses “keep your pecker up” to mean keep your spirits up. “Pecker”? I’ve always thought that was slang for a penis.

A: In colloquial British English, “pecker” has meant courage or fortitude since the mid-19th century, decades before it came to mean penis, chiefly in colloquial American English. Here’s the story.

The noun “pecker” has meant all sorts of things since it first appeared in the late 16th century, when it was a small hoe-like tool used to break up compacted soil.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, which we’ve expanded, is from A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), by the English writer Thomas Hariot:

“The women with short peckers or parers, because they use them sitting, of a foote long and about fiue inches in breadth: doe onely breake the vpper part of the ground to rayse vp the weedes, grasse, & old stubbes of corne stalkes with their rootes.”

The OED says the use of “pecker” for a tool was derived from the avian sense of the verb “peck” (to strike with a beak), a usage that appeared in the 14th century.

Getting back to the expression you ask about, the OED says “pecker” here means “courage, resolution,” and is used “chiefly in to keep one’s pecker up: to remain cheerful or steadfast.”

The earliest example we’ve found is from Portraits of Children of the Mobility (1841), by Percival Leigh and John Leech, anecdotes and illustrations about working-class children in England.

One illustration shows two boys, Tater Sam and Young Spicey, fighting while other boys cheer them on. One bystander shouts, “Tater, keep your pecker up, old chap!”

The first OED citation for “pecker” used in this sense is from a Sept. 15, 1845, letter to The Times, London: “Come, old chap, keep your pecker up.”

The earliest examples we’ve seen for “pecker” used to mean “penis” are cited in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which labels the usage as “orig. US.”

Green’s quotes “The Joy of the Brave,” a bawdy poem intended to be sung to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The slang dictionary dates it at “c. 1864.”

Here’s an expanded version of the citation: “She gave me to feel that nought would suffice / But stiff sturdy pecker, so proud with desire / To stifle that longing, her fierce amorous fire.”

However, we should add that we’ve been unable to find the original source of that poem. Green’s cites a collection published in Britain in 1917, The Rakish Rhymer, which reprints it with no attribution.

Green’s cites another rhyming example from The Stag Party (1888), an American collection of bawdy songs, toasts, and jokes: “My pecker got hard behind the tree … And I found I had no inclination to pee.”

The OED’s earliest example for “pecker” used to mean “penis” is from Slang and Its Analogues, Past and Present (1902), by John Stephen Farmer and William Ernest Henley.

In their entry for “pecker,” the authors list various senses, including “1. The penis; and (2) a butcher’s skewer (see quot. 1622, with a pun on both senses of the word).”

The pun is in this comment by “Hircius, a whoremaster,” in The Virgin Martyr (1622), a play by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger:

“Bawdy Priapus, the first schoolmaster that taught butchers to stick PRICKS in flesh, and make it swell, thou know’st, was the only ningle that I cared for under the moon.” (A “ningle” is an old term for a male friend, especially a homosexual.)

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